This one is personal - for my wife. She was happily snapping photos with a DSLR when rather suddenly it presented the message that her SD card may be damaged. It's a several-year-old Kingston 4gb SDHC class 4 card. I've stuck it in a couple different Windows machines and also into an iMac. No device recognizes that the card has even been plugged in...so there's really not anything I can do to try to recover data. I've done some recovery from SD Cards in the past, but they were all recognized by my computer.

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Sorry, your screwed. The interface controller for the memory has failed. The only recovery would be someone who could remove the memory chip and insert into a donor or replacement controller, but more than likely, the controller is actually integrated inside the memory chip itself and .... your screwed. :(

It's like you might as well have pulled the film out of the camera in broad daylight.

If you can't access the data, it's best to pull the data off of the device instead of trying to fix the file system. Fixing the file system might run into media damage or other problems that could truncate some of the files instead of fixing them. We've seen this type of problem too many times. There are many recovery utilities out there that can determine if there are any physical problems and should be able to show the files properly.

Sometimes thumb drives can't show up in disk management. If this is the problem, then you will want to probably get a professional to help. If you call end up calling DriveSavers be sure to mention DS98006 for a SpiceWorks discount.

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Some are free, some offer a free trial that will show you what they can recover.

I would not run any file system recovery, as you can't predict what that will do, just scan it and receover whatever pops up. Don't restrict yourself to one software, they can often find different results.

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If the computer doesn't see the SDHC card anywhere, /you/ probably wont be able to recover anything from it. - Dont forget to check the BIOS if you have a UEFI based system. It should be able to see the SDHC card if it's plugged in.

The computer has to see the card in some form before the software can see the card to attempt recovery of it.

For a DSLR to say the card is possibly damaged usually means the card itself is toasted. The message likely popped up because the DSLR failed to write to the card at all.

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Probably 80% of the time, if the computer doesn't recognize the card as being present at all, nothing will be recoverable. However, I'm guessing that about 20% of the time I've been able to recover something. I've been able to recover files from USB drives most often using Easeus's data recovery software, even if it didn't appear as a valid drive or connected device. They used to have a free version that would allow you to recover up to 1 GB of data before you had to buy the license.

If the computer doesn't see the SDHC card anywhere, /you/ probably wont be able to recover anything from it. - Dont forget to check the BIOS if you have a UEFI based system. It should be able to see the SDHC card if it's plugged in.

The computer has to see the card in some form before the software can see the card to attempt recovery of it.

For a DSLR to say the card is possibly damaged usually means the card itself is toasted. The message likely popped up because the DSLR failed to write to the card at all.

I'm sorry I wasn't clear on that. The card doesn't show up in Computer Management or Disk Management. Same on the Mac - doesn't show up in the disk utility. I have a Linux live CD somewhere, I'll dig that out and see if Linux can see it.

It may well be that the file system is corrupted and then Windows can't see it as opposed to a really dead SDC hardware. If the data is valuable in that you do not have backups then you may want to use a professional outfit as opposed to risking matters doing it yourself. Risk your wife's wrath if doing it yourself fails.

I use Linux and for me it is easy to see if the card is seen and then I can clone it to work on that. You can use Test Disk to recover partitions and photorec to get the pics back. When doing that you need to save the pics to a different location. This gives you some guidance. https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Edit. See you are trying Linux. Plug the SD card in and run dmesg in a terminal and see what it says. Also, not sure if SMART values work properly with SD cards but under disk it may well show you the condition of the card.

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If I were in the position where I'd exhausted all options without wanting to pay someone $$$ to do a professional attempt, I would hook it up to an arduino and do bit-banging at 250k baud and see if I can get an image off the device. It's $20 worth of microcontroller, wiring and an SD socket. If it's a micro-SD card, you could solder directly to a Micro-to-full SD converter card and plug that into the arduino and skip buying a socket.

Edit: I might be misusing the term bit-banging; it's an SPI protocol. Slower than the typical transfer rate but possibly it will let you see your data if it doesn't even show up as a drive in a full stack OS like windows & Linux.

Are you able to see the pictures if you put the card back in the camera? if so, see if you can transfer the pictures over a cable. I have an estate agent client and this happens occasionally that a card is unreadable on any pc but viewable on the camera.

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Sorry, your screwed. The interface controller for the memory has failed. The only recovery would be someone who could remove the memory chip and insert into a donor or replacement controller, but more than likely, the controller is actually integrated inside the memory chip itself and .... your screwed. :(

It's like you might as well have pulled the film out of the camera in broad daylight.

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It's possible to pull data off the card directly over the SPI bus if you are handy with electronics and feel like taking every last shot you have left with it. There are plenty of guides on how to use an Arduino to directly interact with SD cards over SPI.

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Unless your wife has been neglectful in backing up, then likely any attempts are going to be in the "honey I can fix anything" category to recover a few recent pictures. If this is a matter that she has shot weeks or months of photos and never backed up, slap yourself, then engage a professional. As others have stated, you stand a good chance of destroying a professionals ability to do something with it the more you plug and unplug it.

This should also serve as a warning to others to backup files and also to replace media like this every few years, especially if it is used in an important application.

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Photorec may help. Problem is, if they are RAW format, a lot of recovery software doesn't see it, or recovers it with errors. If its worth it, take it somewhere (Microcenter had some competitive pricing last I saw)

Unless your wife has been neglectful in backing up, then likely any attempts are going to be in the "honey I can fix anything" category to recover a few recent pictures. If this is a matter that she has shot weeks or months of photos and never backed up, slap yourself, then engage a professional. As others have stated, you stand a good chance of destroying a professionals ability to do something with it the more you plug and unplug it.

This should also serve as a warning to others to backup files and also to replace media like this every few years, especially if it is used in an important application.

We definitely aren't neglectful about backing up...the card only contains 2 days' worth of photos. Unfortunately in this case they're really good photos. But they aren't critical to save. She and I were also taking photos with our phones at the same time and they're decent (not as good as the ones shot with the DSLR of course.)

Photorec may help. Problem is, if they are RAW format, a lot of recovery software doesn't see it, or recovers it with errors. If its worth it, take it somewhere (Microcenter had some competitive pricing last I saw)

No dice with photorec. Since the OS can't even see the card, photorec can't see it either.